A few terms you may not be familiar with:
Vlogbrothers: a Youtube channel made by two brothers, Hank and John Green which covers such varied topics as health care policies, pwning Oprah, the difference between being lucky and being deserving, Hitler, sex, Hitler’s sex life, and the occasional cute puppy.
John Green: author of The Fault in Our Stars, among other books. Supports AFC Wimbledon, and Liverpool, despite the fact that Manchester United is clearly superior.
Hank Green: songwriter, science enthusiast. Once spent 15 consecutive hours inside Target. Football club allegiances unclear.
Nerdfighter: a person who is made of awesome, rather than the usual squicky bones and muscles and stuff.
Nerdfighteria: a community, made up of nerdfighters, which sprung up around the Vlogbrothers Youtube videos, and does awesome things like donate to charities and embrace their nerdiness and decrease the amount of bad in the world, all while not forgetting to be awesome.
This week, I had the pleasure of seeing John and Hank Green at the Missoula stop on their tour to promote John’s new book, Turtles All the Way Down, his first book since The Fault in Our Stars was published almost six years ago.
To give you a brief rundown of what the Missoula tour stop entailed: one frank and humorous speech about living with a mental illness in which John describes it as an “actual monster,” one live version of Hank and John’s podcast (Dear Hank and John, for those interested,) a harsh glimpse into the reality of opening a bakery (not recommended by either Green brother,) and a humorous presentation on phylogeny and taxonomy and the strange creature that is the tuatara, presented by Hank Green’s furry alter-ego, Dr. Lawrence Turtleman.
I enjoyed every moment of this show, but there’s one bit I remember in particular, and that was the moment when Hank picked up his guitar to cover Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline,” and we all shared a moment of togetherness in not bop-bop-bopping or so-good, so-gooding.
Because, as John pointed out, we can never know if everyone has bop-bop-bopped, but we can know if everyone has not bop-bop-bopped. And in this way, in this moment of not-bopping, we were together.
There was a moment after we successfully didn’t bop or so-good when John did his best impression of a High School Musical jump-freeze, full of such absolute joy I could almost feel it. His joy, and the joy of my fellow nerdfighters, a feeling which had persisted throughout the entire evening.
But the not-bop feeling always comes to an end, as it did that night. For me, the end of the not-bopping tends to mean a return to dealing with my own monster, one which is consistently, persistently, telling me that even my fleeting moments of happy togetherness don’t matter because I am always going to be alone at the end of the night.
I’ve spent a long time feeling like this like I am alone and strange and just wrong. Much like the tuatara, a creature that chews its food not with teeth, but with bone projections which poke through their gums. A creature that lives a ridiculously long amount of time, and has lived a ridiculous amount of time considering it A) reproduces very slowly and B) are the only surviving members of their order.
It’s a creature that exists, it seems, purely because of the luck of where it happens to live, in New Zealand where it is safely away from pretty much anything that might have stopped it from surviving as long as it has.
Is it lame to identify with a primitive, odd little creature? Probably. But I do. I often feel like I’m missing something like my existence is a random accident rather than something that was meant to happen or makes sense at all. I like to imagine that an anthropomorphic tuatara might, like me, feel just a little bit out of place in this world. A little bit wrong.
For a long time, I felt alone in this wrongness. And sometimes, I still do. But those moments are a little easier to deal with these days. Partly, I like to think, because I’ve grown up a bit. I’m not quite as unstable emotionally as I was when I was sixteen, had been to several different schools, and felt more wrong in the world than ever.
Mostly, I attribute it to finding my place in the world. Or at least, finding out that other people have similar experiences to my own. In this way, the nerdfighter community has been extremely important to me. It’s an ever-growing, ever-evolving community of people both like myself and very unlike myself. It’s a community of people that I can share my experiences with in order to feel less alone, and also a community that reminds me that there is always good somewhere, somehow in the world, even when my small corner feels dark and lonely.
In the past, I’ve underestimated how comforting it can be just to interact with other people who face the same monster inside them that you do. Which is why I’m not only excited but grateful that John has given us Turtles All the Way Down, a book which borrows from the author’s own struggles with mental illness. It’s a topic so many people shy away from and have misconceptions about, which I know from experience makes it incredibly hard to talk about, let alone write about for all the world to see. But it’s so important that we do.
Because if we don’t talk about it, if we don’t write about it, many of us might go on feeling as if we are wrong and alone in our experiences. And take it from me: no one should ever have to feel like they’re alone in the world.
If you haven’t yet had the pleasure of watching a Vlogbrothers video, reading a John Green book, or being part of an awesomely and eternally supportive community, I would highly recommend you join us. We’re cool, we’re diverse, and we hardly ever act like a creepy cult.
To all of you out there, don't forget to be awesome.
